Govt forms panel to look into jobs data calculation

The government has set up a technical committee under former chief statistician TCA Anant to bring in more transparency in jobs data calculation and presentation, the labour ministry said today.



The government has taken measures in recent past to bring in more transparency in data releases, it said in a release.

"It (the ministry) would like to present a proper perspective on these issues so that the end users and public at large become aware of the processes involved in generation of these estimates, the release said.

"Therefore, the government has constituted a technical committee under the chairmanship of former chief statistician TCA Anant to look into the above aspects and submit its report at the earliest," the labour ministry said. 

The Labour Bureau conducts two major surveys on employment scenario -- Annual Employment-Unemployment Survey (EUS) and Quarterly Employment Survey (QES).

The Bureau had so far conducted five annual Employment-Unemployment Surveys and the reports on all five surveys have been released.

The field work of sixth annual Employment-Unemployment Survey (2016-17) has been completed and data entry validation work is in progress, the ministry said.

It said the report pertaining to the sixth survey is to be completed by September.

On the recommendations of Task Force on Employment, chaired by Arvind Panagariya, the then Vice-Chairman of NITI Aayog, the Annual Employment Unemployment Survey has been replaced by Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) being conducted by the Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation (MoSPI).

The labour ministry said the Periodic Labour Force Survey would not only have annual data on employment-unemployment on rural sector but will also have quarterly data on employment-unemployment on urban sector based on larger sample size.

Therefore, the corresponding data set would be comparable, it added.

The Quarterly Employment Survey (new series) is an enterprise based survey, carried out with an objective to measure relative change in employment situation over successive quarters for the establishments having 10 or more workers.

The QES has several limitations like it takes into account those enterprises having more than 10 workers and does not cover employment in establishments having less than 10 workers.

So, the QES, effectively, captures the employment size of about 2.40 crore workers only as against the total workforce of about 47 crore.

The Employees Provident fund Organization (EPFO) has also commenced releasing of payroll data on monthly basis. 

Under Pradhan Mantri Rojgar Protsahan Yojana, 46.36 lakh new employees covering 58,400 establishments have been enrolled under PMRPY and an amount of Rs 855 crore has been spent, the ministry said.(PTI).